Hmm, it is now Aug 24 and I am not sure what has even been posted. I will start from where we entered the fairgrounds on Friday morning. This was very early. The actual convention gets under way on Monday afternoon with people arriving until Monday noon. We are in an area that will be served with electricity on either Saturday or Sunday morning depending on who you believe and the ground under us is sand. We will not have ready access to empty holding tanks or fill with fresh water until the following Friday. We are on strict water conservation in most coaches. That means any meals taken on board will be consumed on paper or plastic and meal preparation will be very limited to avoid significant use of water for cleanup. Grill it or order it in. Showers become a very brief event in a manner that only a US Navy sailor from WWII might understand. There is no readily available laundry so we will make do with what is on board, this not a major hardship as most of us can last a week between laundries anyhow.
Carol is excited about giving her Seminar on photo composition on Wednesday, but we have other things to do before that day arrives. We have agreed to be volunteers, on the Security Detail as it turns out, as part of attending with the Chai Chapter. Carol and I drew three stints of four hours at the entertainment venue for the “Big Shows.” Tuesday was New Odyssey in the Grandstand, an antique outdoor venue best used for watching demo derbies, which is its main use. Preserving any semblance of security became a joke. We had fun welcoming people, being sure they had their badges and ignoring the few who had forgotten theirs. The banter was lively and we enjoyed ourselves enough that we looked forward to the following night with Roy Clark. We had a fine time again, but he was well beyond any ability to entertain. I am not sure if it was recovery from hip surgery six months prior or the pain killers he kept talking about or maybe just age.
Given the weather, oh yes it had rained on Monday night and everything was a sea of mud, they decided to move the third night, The Lettermen, into the indoor arena. This turned into a nightmare for Carol and me. The arena had been used as a meeting room throughout the convention and many people were aware of the back way in to get to the main floor as a result. Unfortunately, that entry was not going to be available because it went right through the area reserved for the entertainers’ dressing rooms. We had to welcome people and guide them to the stands and prevent them from entering the main floor by the easiest route. Even worse this meant there was no apparent entry for those unable to negotiate stairs. To make it even worse we were not given directions to tell people how to get to the main floor without taking stairs. At first we were sending them into the area where the exhibitors were trying to dismantle their booths. Then we sent them into oblivion the other way. After we had misdirected several hundred people we finally got a route that was essentially “leave, walk around the outside of the building and come in from the other side.” Needless to say, many people were not at all happy with us. One man told me to “be nice and just let the man on the scooter in” I put my Security Hat on his head and told him “if you want the job, be my guest!!” That was the last I saw of him and I still have the hat.
Did I mention a sea of mud? There were outlying parking areas on grass that had several large coaches mired up to their bodywork, had they listened and stayed put there would have been no problem. We did not try to move until Thursday. It started to sprinkle again and we had to have the coach in place to be weighed at 9 the following morning. We moved Gee 2 to a front row spot, vacated by an early departure, just a few tens of feet from the paved road. We slept better that night. Our weights were just fine. The left front is 50 pounds heavier than the right. I told Carol that we could fix that real easily; have her do all the driving!
You will have to ask Carol about the seminar. I was there and thought she was brilliant and by far the best seminar presentation I had ever attended, I even stayed awake all the way through it. But then I might be accused of bias. It was well attended and she received many compliments.
We needed some time to ourselves by now. We set off to Hazen, ND. That is as close to no place as you are likely to get. You could look it up; it is on ND 200 30 miles south of Sakakwea Lake (that is NOT a misspelling, at least by me) and 80 miles or so West of Bismarck. The most important thing we did there, besides laundry and a lot of clean up, was to try out our new boat. Doesn’t every second home need a boat? We bought a 13 foot inflatable Kayak made by SeaEagle. It is in the form of a double pontoon boat with place for two seats on the fabric between the pontoons. It inflates in about 5 minutes with included foot pump and turns out to be a delight on the water. We found a spillway impoundment below Garrison Dam that had little current and was set below the dam and surrounding landscape so as to be sheltered from the wind. There we inflated and launched the boat and had a grand time exploring the rather small area and our new boat. It is a wonderful toy. It takes 15 minutes from car to water and a little longer to stow because it needs to dry for 20 or 30 minutes. Whenever we venture out where that might be water and time the kayak will be in the back of the car.
It was time to explore western ND. We headed for Theodore Roosevelt National Park at the extreme western end of the state. It features the ND Badlands and Grasslands as well as Medora. We had plenty of water and no reservations were available in the area so we headed for the National Park Cottonwood Campground. Arriving a little after the noon checkout time we found a glorious, huge site that claimed to be right on the Little Missouri River. I eventually did get to the river, but it was a bit of a walk. By five in the afternoon there was no place even in overflow for anyone to park. Our neighbor recognized us as having been at the Minot Rally and offered us a coupon that we had misplaced to the Musical at Medora. We trundled into town and picked up tickets to the musical and to the Pitchfork Fondue and Buffet that preceded the musical. From there we returned to the park and did a rather hurried circuit of the 30 mile loop road to get a feel for the place. Along the way we saw plenty of Black Tailed Prairie Dogs, some turkeys and several herds of Bison. At one point we had to stop because the Bison were taking their time crossing the road or doing whatever it is they are doing when they walk along the road.
We returned to Gee 2 and showered and got ready to go to the Pitchfork Fondue, well you may ask “What is a Pitchfork Fondue?” There was a very nice buffet line with plenty of salad and veggie to satisfy Carol and at the end of the line the staff was cooking steaks speared on pitchforks in huge drums. Better description: the staff was overcooking steaks. . . It was a lot of fun the music was country and Bernie and Marlene turned up to sit with us. They were attending a Spartan Chassis Rally in town. (For the non Rvers – Spartan is a manufacturer of Diesel chassis used by a number of different Coach manufacturers and they have clubs for owners just like the coach manufacturers). The musical was very elaborate. The amphitheater must have been 5 stories high and the backdrop, when the stage wagons were rolled back was the North Dakota Badlands. The production was really high end college level. The singing was good and we really enjoyed ourselves. The featured attraction was the Chinese Golden Dragon Acrobats! Their act did nothing to forward the story of the history of Medora, but it was great fun. The show ran two hours and there was a five minute intermission, barely time to get to and from the restrooms, much less make use of them. The finale was TR riding horseback over the ridgeline in the distance followed by the National Anthem. It was very stirring.
The next day, Sunday the 21st, we decided to visit the site of the Elkhorn Ranch which was TR’s home ranch in ND in the late 1800’s. The site is now a couple of hundred acres located halfway between the North and South Units of the park. Access to the site is more difficult than most national park areas. There is nothing left to see as the buildings were scavenged for material when TR abandoned the ranch in 1890 or so. We called the Rangers for guidance and directions. Here, in short form, are the directions we received. “Go north up East River Road which will become 702 for about 25 miles on good gravel. When you come to the abandoned school house there will be signs for two left turns and one right turn, take the soft left to the Mosser Ranch and proceed about ¼ mile until you see an abandoned white school van in the brush, park and wade across the river where you will pick up a double track. Follow that until you see a NP sign (white on brown) pointing the way to a mowed path.” He did not comment on the quality of the last stretch of road – unimproved would be a kindness. He did not say that there would be only one sign and it consists merely of an arrow pointing to the right with no indication of what it points to. We did as directed and eventually found a gate with a visitor log for us to sign in. The log was a single lined page and the entry on the first line was dated 11/04 and the last entry before ours was dated 9 days previous. We tramped around the area startling some turkeys and many other small birds. And we eventually arrived at the home site which is fenced off by the archeologists who worked the site in the 1960’s. We returned to the car and had a picnic lunch while we marveled at having experienced the place that was so important to TR in his recovery from the death of his mother and first wife on a single day. The lack of buildings and the relative difficulty of getting there made this a special spot for us too. If you are in the area, do make the effort, Carol and I found the hiking not too strenuous and the drive was great fun, the car is still filled with dust from the road after a week and a couple of washes.
On to South Dakota and the Mt Rushmore Memorial and the Chief Crazy Horse Monument. I hope I can get that written and posted soon as we are now in Mitchell, SD, the home of the Corn Palace. Go figure.